By the end of 2004, Hollywood had been having collective paroxysms over just about each of the preceding years’ big events. “For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives” wasn’t 9/11, but an event that occurred in the previous year, Daniel Henninger wrote in the Wall Street Journal last September: the Florida presidential recount. “The 2000 election ended only when the Supreme Court resolved it in favor of George Bush. Republican and independent voters moved on, but many Democrats never did; they were now being governed by an illegitimate president.”

Add that to their freakouts over Iraq and the War on Terror, and President Bush winning reelection in 2004, and you had a movie industry that was now essentially making movies for themselves, rather than trying please the box office. And the audience — or the lack there of – knew it.

Which brings us to Bill Whittle’s new video above: yes, Han shot first. And yes, he was absolutely right to do so. But as George Orwell once said:

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

And to add to what Bill reminds his viewers of near the end of his video, Lucas considers an ally of the Soviet Union to be the good guys in Star Wars, and America the baddies. Just ask him.

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Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party and supreme leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. He produced my favorite quote at the Soviet Union Communist Party Congress in 1972:
“The fundamental problem we face is that we can only distribute and consume what is actually produced.”

Imagine the grandeur of the event. Communist Party leaders from throughout the Soviet Union were seated before Brezhnev in a large convention hall. This was similar to a US national political convention, but somber and powerful. The Party controlled all aspects of Soviet economic life. They listened in deep respect to every word of their totalitarian ruler.

Brezhnev made the above statement. It was the equivalent of saying with heavy meaning, “Gentlemen, the fundamental problem we face is that 2 + 2 = 4″.

It illustrates the amazing fact that entire countries go crazy, the leaders unable to see the reality that is plainly in front of their eyes.

George Orwell: We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

The Left has never ever forgiven the country for silencing them during the brief couple months after 9/11 — not by shouting them down (however richly they derserved it) or taking away their right to free speech, but by snubbing them, ignoring them, brushing them aside like they didn’t matter: when flying flags from your car’s radio antennae and not only believing in but justifying and defending Western Civilisation was the expected social norm.

Never again must the Left lose its grip on the public microphone. Never again must their unicorn fantasies and Satrian constructs be openly mocked without fear of reprisal. Never again must the Left be shown by concrete tangible events to be utterly, utterly wrong.

If that means Hollywood must run itself into the ground with REDACTED and RENDITION, if that means that the MSM devolves into a nothing more than an obvious cheerleading palace guard, if that measn that academia must align itself with the misogynist, homophobic barbarians of jihad, so be it.

We recently watched an old Futurama episode from 2001 where brains are attacking the earth. The brains have the ability to make normal people extraordinarily stupid. There is a point in the episode where everyone makes a really stupid comment, and the robot, Bender, says something about joining a third party. But now Bender says “Let’s go join the Tea Party”…..

Some things inspired by the Orwell quote that VDH, Green, Whittle and others probably have repeated to exhaustion, but nevertheless:

1.) You cannot spend more than you make and prosper.
2.) You cannot encourage immorality and not have societal disintegration
3.) You cannot encourage, appease and coddle your enemies and not expect war and destruction.
4.) You cannot arbitrarily change the meanings of words and expect harmony in society.
5.) You cannot relentlessly attack the institutions of marriage and family and not expect societal anarchy.
6.) You cannot reward laziness, malfeasance, and apathy, while punishing thrift, innovation and hard work, and expect a healthy economy.
7.) You cannot take away basic guaranteed freedoms and not expect people to react violently.
8.) You cannot expect people to not defend themselves against the criminality and anarchy that your (the Hollywood-Leftist) worldview and relativism have fostered.
9.) You cannot create a parasitical class majority who pay no taxes and that feed off of the minority who do, and not expect an economic collapse.
10.) You cannot foment hatred, ignorance, and prejudice in the name of “tolerance” and expect a society of peace and harmony.

“ Early on in the 90s a switch flipped, and everything on the radio started to sound annoying or irrelevant,”

Whatever the reason, it was well and truly over by then. Plenty of great musicians have played on, even today, but they were older by then, and with the focus of the industry on the young, they, those new young, just didn’t have it, and there was no there there. A highly productive era in music was over, and that’s where the end began. The rot. Not worth the time nor the bother.

I never liked Star Wars. I fell asleep watching it when someone dragged me to a midnight showing of it in it’s first release. After twenty six minutes of tailers, and a very long hard working day I was not in the mood for it.

The decline of movies was well under way by the time 1977 rolled around, but I can see why people liked the movie because Han Solo was not about to let himself be enslaved nor killed, and, for the benefit of the audience, he lets the enemy guy state his inhuman terms, and mock Solo with his cruel plans so that we know Han had every right to kill him, and that picking his moment to do so is the mark of a person not to be trifled with. Good work Mr. Solo. Timing is everything.

Popular music has always been for the young. Most people disparage it when they get older because they have no ownership. It’s a simple progression like moving from Democrat to Republican. People like to think the the music of their youth is better, but the reality is (with a few exceptions) most people think the music at their coming of age was the best. I am one of the exceptions, because the I graduated at the peak of the disco era. No illusions about the quality there.

I think music has it’s ups and downs. Early 80′s were good. Late 80′s and early 90′s sucked (Couldn’t get into hair bands or grunge). But all along I have music in my collection from each era. There’s some remarkably good stuff being put out today. I think to say that there isn’t any good new music is more a sign of nostalgia than a real assessment of music.

I thought I-tunes and such made it possible for people to find the music that was good, far away or near, single song or album, without the prettification required for MTV. Kris Rusch wrote that musicians she knew could get dental work done, with the advent of independent downloads.

When did George Lucas stop being a man and turn into a PC wuss? And when did he cross over to the dark side and embrace Orwellian tactics to rewrite the history of Han Solo? Must be a curse for creating the Jar Jar Binks character.

I was born in 1961. You have several of my 90′s picks on your list. I might add Counting Crows, Crash Test Dummies, Gin Blossoms, Chris Rea, Cowboy Junkies, Pearl Jam, Tool, Bush, Alice in Chains, and others. I still keep tabs on new alternative, and The Muse, Coheed and Cambria, Machinae Supremacy, Florence + the Machine, Foster the People, are in my collection.

I tend to dabble in non-radio music from time to time. In the 90′s, I picked up a lot of New Age and Celtic. More recently I’m into Japanese and Ambient genres.

I guess I always need new music. Old stuff gets “worn out” on the oldies and classic rock channels and I start to forget what was so great about them. But I’ve been told I’m different than most. For many, the music of their youth is as meaningful as ever. As I once heard, “I like to visit the past, not live in it” musically.